
Roger McDonald is a Japanese (not English any more) curator/writer living and working in Tokyo. He is a founding member of
AIT, a group of dedicated curators who teach and organize residencies for foreign artist who want to discover Japan.
What will happen in 2012?The Future will become Primitive. In other words, ideas of the future as something ahead of us in time, as a tablet onto which we project futures, will cease to be. This will most likely be because of significant technological or quantum mechanical discoveries, such as the laboratory
realization of time travel. This would effectively 'end' History understood as a rationally progressing linear journey from the past into the present and onto the future. It would be important to note that the discovery that subverts History emerges from the very tools which it created, namely scientific method. The 'ending' of History would therefore not be some apocalypse or catastrophe as depicted by Hollywood, but rather the effective subversion of our Modern ideas of Time. I say the Future will become Primitive in the sense that this situation will once again allow for multiple felt experiences of Time. The role of computers and the internet in
this will probably be very great. I imagine computers becoming ever smaller in size, as they incorporate nano-technologies. Computers will effectively become shamanic tools for ecstasy-seeking, to borrow the phrase of the shamanic scholar Mircea Eliade. We will perhaps swallow computers, like psilocybin mushrooms, and enter into labyrinthine webs of information, data
and shared experience. Instead of being the domain of a privileged few, the seeking of knowledge and ecstasy will be allowed for all through such technologies. The 'ending' of History as we know it, will also be a clarion call for systemic change across many levels from the way we conduct politics, organize societies, manage nature, as well as how we inhabit our minds and bodies.